


Walk With Me

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: Revelation Space Series - Alastair Reynolds
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Murder Mystery, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 19:18:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8813008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: Working undercover on the colony world of Resurgam, Ana Khouri investigates a dead body murdered with a very unusual weapon. Solving the mystery will require some help from Ilia Volyova, and reveal a little about her past in the process.(Set between the end of Revelation Space and the beginning of Redemption Ark.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bravofiftyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bravofiftyone/gifts).



> Content warning: implied surgical operation on eyeballs, oppressive fascist state, canon-typical violence.

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

The body had been dumped in a back alley, sprawled into the gutter like so much refuse. Khouri knelt over it, the chill of a Cuvier dawn seeping through her trouser legs from the concrete. The man’s middle-aged features were blurred by whiskers of hoarfrost, his pale skin even paler where the clothes had been stripped. 

“What do you make of it, Marceau?”

Her driver looked out the car window. If he resented the unscheduled stop— missed the warmth and vile coffee back at Inquisition House— he was wise enough not to say so.

“It doesn’t look political, boss.”

“No?”

Marceau was almost certainly right. Internal Threats kept a close eye on Cuvier; nobody had forgotten how the current regime had taken the city forty years earlier, smashing government strongholds with pinpoint antimatter bombs. If someone had wanted to commit a political crime, though, this wouldn’t have been a bad place to do it. It had been a long time since Khouri had been an assassin, but she still had a tactician’s eye for ground. She’d have liked this alley, close to the main road where the target would be passing, but small and quiet enough to make interruptions unlikely.

If she pretended it was political, she could manufacture some work for herself, she decided. She had been working her way into the regime’s security service for several years now, living full-time under her cover identity. Now, she was angling for a promotion, the last and trickiest step up the ladder in the Office of External Threats. Such a step demanded results, dramatic ones if possible. And although there was always the search for Triumvir Volyova, there were… obvious problems with making too much progress there.

“I think it could be terrorism,” she said. “Call site forensics.”

“Yessir.”

She saw Marceau’s shoulders slump as he resigned himself to another hour in the cold. Too bad for him. She smiled a little. The killing would probably turn out to be trivial: a black-market turf war, or some kind of domestic dispute. But it would be a chance to raise her profile nonetheless. Besides, she was sick of faking evidence. For once, she might actually get to do some honest work.

* * *

The medical imaging system in Inquisition House was an older model, and Khouri— “Proctor Vuilleumier”, she reminded herself— had to wait for a result. Sitting at her desk, she reviewed the day’s files: requests for additional surveillance, dossiers on possible enemies, all the usual garbage. Four sightings of the Triumvir in the past week. Up from last year, even. Forty years after the Phoenix incident, and Volyova still loomed large in the minds of anxious civilians.

The regime was encouraging their interest, she knew. Khouri had been filling one of her dustier cabinet drawers with successive episodes of their newest propaganda effort, an interactive biography of the fugitive. The rationale was plain, though even within Inquisition House nobody spoke openly about it: let the citizens dwell on the past while the government took care of the present.

Khouri herself had been considered for the propaganda department, once upon a time, but she had passed it up. She had thought of it as a backwater, a post for a grasping mediocrity like Proctor Masseter. She had underestimated it, she thought reluctantly. Or him. In the last two years, Masseter had become a rising star. Rumor had it he was her closest competitor for promotion once Invigilator Passeulet retired.

Perhaps it was time to take Propaganda seriously, she thought. Whatever trash they were putting out was undeniably compelling. One of the reports about the Triumvir had come from a terraforming station so far outside the optical hardline network that the caller had actually paid to send it. And the imaging might not be done for hours. She reached into the drawer for a cartridge.

**“Volyova: Criminal beginnings”: Novgorod, 2348**

* * *

The ragpickers came aboard gawking like tourists. Nearly all of them had been born on stations, stations that might have fit comfortably inside the lighthugger’s main cargo bay. _Vision of a Doorway_ was nearly a kilometer across at its widest point, and the other side of the chamber hung above them like the vault of a massive archway.

Volyova stared up at it, picking out the delicate fretwork of supports that held it up. They seemed thin as wires, until she looked down again, following the lines down the cylindrical wall of the bay from the “ceiling” to the “floor”. Closer up, what had looked like wires were rounded hills, a little taller than she was. High overhead, the spine of the ship ran down the long axis of the bay, sprouting giant lamps and vents, cameras and lift shafts.

But the view, she reminded herself, would wait. She was here to work. Ragpickers weren’t paid very much, even by Novgorod standards, although the Ultras offered basic neural implants for free. A few of them had probably signed on for that alone; Novgorod medics handled broken bones and skin cancers, not neurosurgery. But the real compensation was the possibility— always hinted at, never guaranteed— that the best of them could find a more permanent position. Lighthuggers took on crew, after all; Ultras were chosen, not born. Volyova could stay in Novgorod, live another hundred years or so, raise a few pale, unappealing children, and die. Or she could see the galaxy: Yellowstone, Shiva-Parvati, the First System. Suns without names, worlds no human had ever mapped, a thousand years of deep time.

She keyed her bracelet, asking the ship for directions: first to her quarters in the dormitory, then to the doctor’s laboratory. 

* * *

She rode an elevator up to the central shaft, then further, out of the cargo spaces. This was crew territory: the walls were gray and bare, devoid of decoration. Ultras strolled the corridors like brightly colored angelfish in a reef tank. Most of them didn’t deign to notice her; the one who did spat something at her in Norte, his tone as clear as any translation. Volyova kept moving, eyes on her bracelet.

The doctor was tall, epicene, skin mottled with a strange, bluish pattern that Volyova tried very hard not to stare at. She couldn’t quite tell if the pattern was moving or not. It made her slightly nervous. She lit a cigarette, then, seeing the doctor’s expression, put it out.

“The standard package?” The doctor’s voice was an odd, inhuman twittering sound. Volyova couldn’t tell if it was bored or merely incapable of expression.

“What’s in that?”

“Sensory augmentation, entoptic visualizers, servo interface… We can throw in translation for Norte, unless you speak it already. Do you?”

“Not very well, but I—”

“Norte, basic biofeedback, comms. Do you want a lifelogger?”

“What?”

“Neural backup, records your persona as a beta-level simulation to wrap up your affairs in case of death. So many ways to die out here, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Fine, that sounds—”

“Oh. And we can stop you smoking. Filthy habit, don’t you think?”

Volyova nodded.

* * *

The doctor reached out and touched a control on the wall, and she felt a sudden buzzing pressure. She tried to scratch her nose, and couldn’t. Her arm was paralyzed— no, not just her arm, her whole body. She couldn’t even blink.

“Transcranial magnetic suppression,” the doctor commented, as if reading her thoughts. “And now for the implantation… traditionally, we go in through the eye orbits for this kind of thing. Close to the optic nerve, the cortex, all the good stuff.”

The doctor reached out a blue-mottled arm, lazily swinging out a heavy metal device. It was a kind of mask, Volyova saw. Steel claws reached out from the sides; a large imaging device perched on the forehead, lens pointed inward. In the deep tunnels of the eye sockets, silvery spikes came awake, spinning and probing at the air. She tried to concentrate on the doctor’s arm. The bluish pattern had definitely moved. She was undergoing a routine procedure. She had asked for it to happen. The mask sank slowly towards her face, as if trying her on for size, then hung, poised, directly in front of her.

“Let’s switch the anaesthesia on now, shall we?” said the doctor, and she realized that the Ultra had been savoring her fear. The flatness of the voice wasn’t boredom at all but careful, measured cruelty. There was a click, and everything went dark.

* * *

She was still stumbling back to the cargo bay when the entoptic projectors finished self-assembling inside her eyeballs. Suddenly she could see that the corridors weren’t gray or lifeless at all. In virtual space, they were hung with paintings, lit up by windows that opened onto lush, alien greenery.

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

Resurgam didn’t have the facilities to make complex electronics yet, so Inquisition House ran on old-fashioned files: paper, fabricated in coarse, fibrous reams from flax and switchgrass. Khouri had once tried to calculate how much of the planet’s agricultural capacity was wasted turning the stuff out. She couldn’t remember her estimate, but it had been depressing.

The medical report had arrived from the basement by pneumatic tube. She’d cleared a space on her desk, pulling out yet more paper in case she needed to make notes. The process frustrated her, as always; it reminded her of the distance between this backward world and anything she could conceivably think of as home.

At least the medical imager was still working acceptably. It had scanned the body in detail, taking a variety of samples for chemical analysis. The result was puzzling: the man’s neurons had been disrupted on the cellular level, synapses throughout the cortex blasted open with precise, localized applications of energy. He had died the death of a thousand cuts— billions of cuts, in fact, each one made on the molecular scale. Khouri had heard about something similar, but she couldn’t think of what. It would have been an easy problem to solve, of course, if she’d had access to a proper, searchable database. Instead, she had files.

Marceau’s cubicle was down the hall. She looked in, catching his eye over a desk piled high with busywork and unwashed coffee mugs.

“What’s up, boss?”

She beckoned; anything odd was better discussed in her own office, where they could shut the door. Marceau leafed obediently through the report.

“Any ideas what did this?”

“Nope.”

Marceau shrugged. He didn’t seem that disappointed; Khouri doubted he’d understood much of the file, or expected to. Education had suffered since the fall of the Girardeau regime. She hadn’t had high hopes either, but she needed a sounding board.

“What are we looking at, then?”

“Stiff in an alley, naked, died of something weird.”

“Weird, yeah. Something complicated. Whatever did it must have come on a lighthugger, which means it’s been floating around for quite a while. But whose is it?”

“Well, that’s simple— beg your pardon, Proctor. But there’s only two choices: us or them.”

“‘Us’ meaning this office.”

He looked at her sidelong. She’d grown to recognize that expression; it was one she saw a lot on Resurgam. He was trying to decide how much it was safe to say out loud.

“The government has all sorts of devices stashed away. If we were responsible, I’m sure he deserved it, Proctor. He could’ve been a terrorist, a spy…”

“It’s possible,” she agreed. “And I think you’re right; if he wasn’t a terrorist himself, the people who killed him probably were.”

“Maybe we’ve finally got a lead on the Triumvir? That new biography says she loves exotic weaponry.”

Khouri nodded.

“It’s a lead we have to follow up,” she said. “Of course, you know what the next step is.”

“What’s that, Proctor?”

“If he was a person of interest, he’ll be on file. Take the biometrics down to the basement and see if we’ve got anything on him.”

Marceau groaned. When she’d first drafted him into External Threats, he’d asked whether he’d ever qualify for a real office. The building took up four blocks of downtown Cuvier. Surely desk space couldn’t be that tight. She’d sent him downstairs to tour the archives,and he’d stopped asking. Internal Threats had dossiers on nearly four million persons of interest, and they added more every day. He’d be down there for a while.

Khouri considered her next move. Marceau was diligent enough, but he wasn’t an investigator. He needed doors to kick down and cringing suspects to browbeat; he was out of his depth with evidence. His us-and-them worldview reminded her of herself, back on Sky’s Edge. It had been an advantage for a soldier, but it had made her easy to manipulate. The long voyage to Resurgam had taught her to be more careful, although the lessons had come close to killing her more than once. And with that thought in mind, she knew exactly who she wanted to talk to. She reached for a map, considering rendezvous sites.

**“Volyova: Criminal beginnings”: Novgorod, 2348**

* * *

Standing on a strut in the cargo bay wall, Volyova looked down into the scrap heap. Just in front of her, an abandoned mining platform lay on its side, stranded in a shallow pool of water that glistened with floating oil. It was a few hundred meters across: large enough for a small team of miners, if they weren’t worried about cabin fever. Beyond the station was another, and then what looked like another. She queried her new implants, tentative with the unfamiliar interface. _Vision of a Doorway_ had acquired twenty-two stations, most of them slightly larger than this one, along with their ancillary servitors and extractors.

Novgorod wasn’t a typical colony system. Its innermost planet was too small and too hot for humans to live in comfort, the outer ones too far and too cold. The inner planet was covered in stagnant, shallow seas, poisoned with heavy metals. But the colonists had seen it as an opportunity. They would live in space, spending only enough time on the surface to mine out the raw materials for lighthugger hulls. They had named the planet Kitezh, after a miraculous vanishing city in an old folktale.

Now, with the Conjoiners tightening the supply of starship engines, Kitezh seemed much less like a miracle. After a few shots of bitter manufactory vodka, though, most of older colonists would admit that the vanishing was definitely real. Half the mining stations had already been sold for scrap. They hadn’t even been disassembled first, just scooped wholesale onto shuttles and hauled up into orbit, where locally hired ragpickers could pull out anything small and valuable enough to export out of system.

* * *

“Can you see a good way down?”

Salma Beridze shook her head. They’d decided the night before to team up for their first foray into the scrap, mostly by default. Many of the ragpickers had come aboard with friends or partners from the same orbital habitats. Volyova had thought about joining one of those groups; she’d sat down by a circle of four from Kharkov Habitat who sounded like they’d been on board for a week or two already, nervously introducing herself. The man opposite her was tall and leanly muscular. He was lying back in his chair, his pose projecting lazy self-assurance. He looked up for a second.

“Kemal Lazarev,” he said, without inflection. The other three took his cue, stating their names as if reading them out of a directory. None of them made any further move to talk to her.

After five minutes, she’d looked up to see a brightly colored entoptic orbiting just above her head: _brezgatnik_. A joke at the new girl’s expense— one they assumed she wouldn’t get, since most of the newcomers wouldn’t have gotten their implants yet.

She’d canceled the lettering, then walked away in silence. On the other side of the room, she’d noticed Beridze sitting by herself, nursing a cooling cup of tea. She had looked like the quiet type, and Volyova wasn’t in the mood to be friendly.

“Let’s just do it,” she said, and slid down into the muck. The water slopped against her boot tops. Both of them were wearing full-body skinsuits, fabricated by a nanotech device in their living quarters. But the feeling was unpleasant nonetheless. The underside of the platform had housed the anchors and funnel-mouthed reactor intake, but it was crusted with alien biomatter. Kitezh had life of sorts, but nothing very interesting. The first survey team had taken chemical samples, looking for the tell-tale phospholipids of complex cells membranes. They hadn’t found any; the metal-rich water was simply too toxic for them to develop. In the absence of anything larger, the oceans were full of algae-like phytoplankton that grew into a slimy, dripping coating on anything that spent too long submerged.

Beridze turned towards the upper side of the platform, where the living quarters had been.

“Wait a second,” Volyova called. She reached out through her implants, checking for network connections. There was something, she thought: a faint signal from the water underneath the reactor intake spout. She opened a connection, using the processors in her bracelet to brute-force the security certificate. Nothing on Kitezh had been secured particularly carefully— where was there to take it once it was stolen?

The servitor thrashed, then rose from the water, dripping purplish alien algae. It balanced for a second, then collapsed beneath the surface again.

“One of its legs is broken,” Volyova said. “Help me get it up?”

Beridze splashed her way back towards the funnel and the two of them quickly hauled the broken servitor up onto the platform. It was a repair drone, vaguely penguin-shaped, with short, flipper-like limbs better suited to water than land. Her first find, thought Volyova, and she hadn’t even set foot on the platform.

“I doubt it’s worth much,” Beridze said skeptically.

“Not on its own. Help me fix this fin and I can slave it to my bracelet— it can swim around and find us more stuff.”

* * *

They worked in silence for several more hours, stripping the platform bare. Volyova found it an eerie experience. The mining platforms had never had a good reputation; miners told stories of odd, inexplicable accidents, sea ghosts that snatched solitary divers or crouched in ambush at the bottoms of maintenance tunnels. They were stories for lonely, drunk people stranded far from home, and she’d never paid them much attention, but now they flickered, unwanted, through her mind as she turned corners or peered into crawl spaces. She reminded herself that her lifelogger was operating now. If she died, she could be restored as a beta-level software simulation. It wasn’t much comfort.

The platform’s tilt forced her to enter rooms at odd angles, climbing through doorways or lowering herself down corridors. Some of the miners had left things behind: cheap sets of chopsticks with the company logo, a half-empty liquor bottle, a cage and water bottle for some kind of pet rodent. Here and there she found something worth salvaging. There were nanopore filters in the reactor ventilator, and a simple manufactory that made new ones when the old ones wore out. She found a working weather station on the roof, complete with a gamma-level persona to make predictions. Twice, Beridze called her to help detach a larger piece of equipment from the reactor. For the most part, they worked alone.

* * *

It was midafternoon when the penguin drone found something big. Volyova was folded nearly double under the kitchen storage unit, unscrewing what looked like a medichine sterilizer, but she welcomed the chance to take a break. It felt good to get out of the mining station. She stretched, reaching her hands up towards that impossibly distant ceiling, then used her bracelet to get a bearing on the drone. It wasn’t far; she could see Beridze already headed in the right direction. But just beyond her, standing over what must be the site itself, were four other people. Cursing to herself, Volyova splashed her way through the reeking muck, hoping she was misinterpreting the situation.

“Be reasonable,” Beridze was saying as Volyova finally arrived. “Our drone was here before you were.”

“I didn’t see any drone,” Lazarev said. “We were doing a search of the bottom and Yelena here just happened to spot a magnetic anomaly.”

He waved back at the woman, prompting her.

“That’s right,” the girl said, as if taking a cue. The four Kharkovians looked like siblings, Volyova thought sourly. Tall, evenly muscled, blandly attractive: like spokespeople for a drearily uninventive fascist government.

“There’s plenty more to find around here,” Lazarev carried on magnanimously. “We don’t even know what this thing is yet— could be totally worthless.”

“We’ll take the risk, then, and you can keep looking around,” said Beridze. 

Lazarev shook his head briefly and turned back to his friends.

“All right, let’s get this thing uncovered.”

Beridze stepped in closer.

“Don’t ignore me, you bastard. You back off, or—”

“Careful, now. Or are you asking to take a walk with me?”

Beridze looked back at Volyova.

“Back me up, here,” she said. “This thing is ours, and he just happened to stumble over it. There’s no way I should have to fight some kind of stupid duel for it. You saw the whole thing, you can tell the Ultras about it—”

Volyova shook her head.

“Let it go, Salma. The Ultras don’t give a damn who finds what.”

“But we can—”

“Listen to yourself. Did you just say he challenged you to a duel?”

“That’s how they do it in the big habitats. You walk off into a scrap heap or a parts warehouse together, and use whatever you find to— settle the dispute.”

“And that’s what you want to do? Fight a man with parts from a junk heap, all for a random piece of salvage? Come on. We’ll find something else.”

Slowly, Beridze turned away, and the two of them splashed back toward the platform. There was no spinning entoptic this time. It wasn’t necessary; Volyova could feel Lazarev’s disdain perfectly well without the implants.

* * *

“Bad luck,” Beridze said. “It would serve him right if it was worthless after all.”

“It was an autonomous prospector,” said Volyova. “One of the big ones, a crab spider: the readings from the drone were pretty clear. The chemical analysis suite alone is worth a fortune.”

“But you said—”

“We’d have been idiots to fight him, and I didn’t see any other way. I don’t think it was bad luck they found it, either.”

She looked down at the little penguin-shaped drone.

“I think we were hacked.”

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

“And?”

“Yes, the victim had a file in the archive. He worked in the propaganda section, apparently. Worked on their new biography. Have you seen it? It’s quite good so far.”

“Seen it? Why should I? I thought I was meant to have lived it.”

“Probably funnier the second time, though.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said Volyova, exhaling a cloud of smoke. The Triumvir was in a good mood today, Khouri thought. The two of them were sitting in a surveyor’s hut above the remains of an archaeological dig site, abandoned since the Sylveste days. The air was freezing, heavy with an unpleasant combination of dust and snow. The flimsy walls didn’t keep much of it out. Terraforming had created all kinds of interesting weather, and Khouri hated them all.

Volyova didn’t seem to feel it. She was wrapped in layers of poorly fit clothing, like a refugee wearing everything she owned; her skin was pale and she looked thinner than ever. But her eyes gleamed with animation, and she waved her cigarette around the frigid little building as if she owned the place. She did, in a sense; even without the cache weapons on board Nostalgia for Infinity, Khouri suspected her remaining shuttles and powersuits had the firepower to take on most of Resurgam’s armed forces and win.

“So, a dead propagandist. Are we here to mourn, or celebrate?”

“It’s more about how he died. Damage at the neuronal level, throughout the cortex. I’m not sure what kind of technology could even do that, let alone why.”

“Aren’t you? Think back to Chasm City. It was one of your old stalking grounds, if I remember.”

“What was?”

“The monument to the Eighty. Or did you just shoot the place up without reading any of the plaques on the walls?”

Khouri shook her head with annoyance. She should have thought of it herself; everyone in the Yellowstone system had heard the story at one time or another. The Eighty had died voluntarily, their brains sacrificed to Calvin Sylveste’s experimental scanner. Their minds had lived on as alpha-level simulations— for a while. She’d never stopped to think about what the scanner had actually done, or what sort of damage it might leave behind.

“So the next question is where the scanner came from, I suppose.”

“Yellowstone, I imagine,” said Volyova. “Dan Sylveste could have built one, but not with local technology. No, I think it came over with the settlers.”

“With the murderer.”

“An interesting hypothesis. Do you think that’s who brought the massive computer, as well?”

“To run the alpha-level, you mean.”

Khouri considered.

“It doesn’t make much sense, honestly. Why run a simulation of a junior propagandist, even a good one? I can think of better things to do with that much computing power. I’ve heard stories about running sims on human brain tissue; could they be doing that?”

“Eidetic imprinting? The Sylvestes worked on that too. The hardware would be similar, but imprinting doesn’t usually last, unless you pick the subject very carefully. Most of the implanted memories break down. After a week or two, only the sim’s strongest motivations would stay around. Unless your man really loved propaganda, I doubt they’d get much research out of him. Not that I imagine they’re doing research in the first place.” Volyova smirked.

“No, they’re making it up as they go,” Khouri said. “In the very first chapter, you got implants from an Ultra surgeon. I don’t think they know you don’t have any.”

“Interesting,” said Volyova. “Where was this meant to have been?”

“A lighthugger called _Vision of a Doorway_. Ever heard of it?”

Volyova nodded.

“Maybe they are doing research, after all. I wonder what their source is.”

“Then it’s accurate after all?”

“Some of it.”

“The implants? The salvaging?”

Volyova sucked at her cigarette meditatively. Khouri hadn’t really expected a response; she’d been needling the woman for decades without learning much about her past.

“I’ll figure out what their source is,” she said, sighing deeply. “Sometimes I wish I got to be the orbital fugitive. I hate this planet.”

“You should have let the Mademoiselle blow it up when you had the chance.”

“Yeah. I should have.”

“Do you really envy me my ship slime?”

“I’m going to have to speak with Proctor Masseter. At least ship slime doesn’t talk.”

**“Volyova: Criminal beginnings”, Novgorod, 2348**

* * *

“Take a look at this.”

“What is it? Some sort of mineral deposit?”

“I don’t think so.”

Beridze frowned, puzzled. They had gone much further into the scrap today, nearly to the middle. Losing the prospector had put them behind in their effort to impress the Ultras; the half-day she’d spent hardening her bracelet against infiltration programs hadn’t helped. Neither of them had mentioned this explicitly, but when Volyova suggested they risk a longer expedition, Beridze had simply nodded and packed up her tools, checking the penguin drone to make sure it had enough power saved up for the journey.

Now they were standing under the funnel of one of the larger stations. Like the smaller, newer one they had examined on the first day, it was covered with a beard of dark violet algal fronds, the upper half now dry and brittle from its time out of water. Touching the stuff no longer bothered Volyova; she knew the skinsuit would protect her, and the visceral unpleasantness of it had faded after the first few hours in the scrap. But the smell was still awful, decaying organics mixing with the hot, metallic reek of foundry exhaust. The metal-rich seas of Kitezh had birthed some very strange biochemistry, she thought, wishing she could light up a cigarette. She reminded herself again that Ultras didn’t smoke.

The deposit Beridze had noticed was on the lower part of the funnel, nearly submerged in the muck; Volyova crouched uncomfortably to take a look. It was certainly odd-looking: a section of the funnel was covered in fist-sized nodules like leathery raisins. Like the algae, they were purplish, though perhaps a bit darker. Volyova prodded one; it felt rough and flabby.

“I don’t think it’s a mineral,” she said. “Looks like an algal colony to me. They must have evolved some kind of protective membrane.”

“Protection against what?” asked Beridze.

“Other algae, perhaps? Some kind of intragroup competition? The miners did a survey, there’s nothing else out there.”

“Could they have been wrong?”

“I guess so. I don’t think they looked all that hard, but I’ve never heard of macroscopic life that can hide from a chemical scan. What would it even be made out of?”

“Who knows? I’m taking a sample anyway. If we find something new, it could be worth something.”

“I really doubt it. If there’s a big market in ugly little algae colonies, the news has passed me by.”

“I’m taking one anyway.” Beridze pulled out a scraper.

“Fine with me, I’ll see you topside.”

* * *

It was a long climb up the side of this station, and Volyova’s arms ached with exhaustion as she pulled herself from the slippery ladder onto the deck. The skinsuit would keep her from being poisoned, but it wouldn’t stop a twenty-foot fall from breaking her neck. She leaned against a stanchion, looking up at the superstructure above her while she caught her breath.

The miners had made some effort to decorate; the platform had been painted white, and then decorated with murals. A smiling mermaid looked up from a turquoise sea, waving at a lighthugger with engines at full blast. Under a brilliant red-gold sunset, blocky Cyrillic letters spelled out “two more years to go”. She could see, under the paint, the faint shadow of a “three”. It must have been an impressive place when it was operating; now, the murals were dingy and covered with scrapes where the shuttle’s scoop had knocked against the platform as it was lifted out of the ocean.

Time to push forward. She began to climb the sloping surface of the deck, stopping here and there to investigate alcoves that might hold working devices. One small niche halfway up held another mural, an icon of the Virgin. She looked sad, Volyova thought, brushing the dirt away to get a closer look; part of the face was dented, giving the saint an oddly emotional look, as if she were struggling not to weep. Below her, neat lettering spelled out five names and dates. Despite all the maintenance, the platform had apparently been a dangerous place to work.

Shaking her head, she walked on toward the bridge, where she was pleased to find some intact sensor control modules and a largish manufactory, a few decades old but still in working condition. Half an hour’s work took the sensor controls safely out of their housing. The manufactory, though valuable, would be a two-person job, and they’d need to improvise some kind of sledge to haul it back. She brought up her implants’ comm function and called Beridze.

She wasn’t active. Volyova checked her own connection, wondering if the metal around her was interfering, but the status light was green; the Ultras’ relay was reading her fine. Looking deeper into the interface, though, she did notice something she’d missed; a series of messages from the penguin drone, growing increasingly urgent over the past several minutes. It had found something it couldn’t identify, something that wasn’t in the database of machine parts it had been told to look for.

Volyova pulled up the readings and swore, running for the edge of the platform. She made it down the ladder in half the time it had taken her to get up, leaping the last ten feet to land recklessly in the water, then splashed toward the funnel. Beridze was lying face-up in the mud, the drone circling around her like a worried dog. The implants scrolled diagnostic readouts across Volyova’s vision in red: no breathing, no pulse, residual body heat only. Volyova knelt over the body, her own senses confirming what the implants already knew: Beridze was dead.

Her left hand still clutched two filled sample bags; her left was empty. Whatever had killed her had come from behind, smashing her in the back with enough force to shatter her spine. A big servitor could have done it— something built to move carefully through tight spaces, so she wouldn’t hear it coming, and rigged with powerful manipulators for cutting through the stony seabed. Something like the prospector.

It must have been hunting them all day, Volyova thought. Watching them as they traveled through the scrap heap, out of sight of the other groups. Waiting. She had been angry at Lazarev before, resented him as a rival who didn’t play fair. She had wanted to beat him. Now, she wanted him dead.

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

Khouri sat in the uncomfortable chair opposite Masseter’s desk and tried not to fidget. The man’s choice of furniture was quite deliberate; Khouri’s seat was an inch lower than Masseter’s and put her back squarely to the door. It was a trick older than spaceflight, but she had to admit to herself that it was working.

“When we discovered that the victim was part of your section, we thought we had better brief you on the case.”

“Very thoughtful of you, Vuilleumier. What have you found out?”

“The cause of death was interesting. He’d been cut apart at the synaptic level.”

“Interesting.” If Masseter meant what he said, it didn’t come across in his voice.

“We were wondering what he did for your section, exactly.”

“Coordinator Tan? He worked mainly on our biography of the Triumvir. Not the kind of post you’d think gets people killed.”

“Do you know what sources he was using? Perhaps one of them turned on him.”

“Sources? I assumed he was making the whole thing up. We’re propagandists, after all.” Masseter waved a hand dismissively. “It’s what we do.”

The meeting wasn’t going as Khouri expected. She was being stonewalled; she hadn’t thought Masseter had the restraint. In their previous meetings, he’d been eager to boast. She’d anticipated him offering up a flurry of mostly pointless leads and fishing for compliments after each one.

“The biography is very gripping,” she offered. “I’ve enjoyed the first few episodes.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

“Was it your idea to frame it as a biography? It was very clever of you— taking the Girardeau biography of Sylveste as a model. I hear it’s still quite popular as a kind of historical romance.”

“Very clever, but I’m afraid I can’t take credit. The original idea was Tan’s.”

“Will you have to shelve the project, then? Now that you don’t have Tan’s notes?”

“On the contrary, we’re going to press on. It’s what he would have wanted.”

“I’m sure it is. Do you know what he had planned?”

“Tell me, Vuilleumier, what makes you think Tan’s notes are so important?”

Stupid, Khouri thought. Stupid to show her interest so openly. It was bad enough that Masseter was giving her nothing; she didn’t have to leak all her own secrets as well.

“We have to follow up every lead, of course.” Even to herself, she didn’t sound convincing.

“Tan’s storyline, though? You don’t suspect he had some secret information about the Triumvir, do you?”

“It’s possible,” she admitted reluctantly. “One of our deep cover agents said some of the details tallied with their own research.”

“A deep cover agent with information about the Triumvir’s past. I must admit, Proctor, you certainly know the most fascinating people.” Masseter steepled his fingers, and his mouth crooked into a self-satisfied grin. “Tell me, did this shadowy figure have any insight into the murder itself? A lead on one of Calvin Sylveste’s little toys?”

“We’re following up, and I’ll certainly let you know if we find anything. But, about Tan’s notes?”

“Of course, my people will grant you every access. But I warn you, you won’t find anything.”

No, I expect not, thought Khouri— nothing but a massive pile of paperwork it’ll take me a week to filter through. You’ll have made sure everything interesting is gone by now, won’t you?

“Thank you for your help,” she said, levering herself from the uncomfortable chair.

“Glad to assist.”

He had to be covering for someone, Khouri thought. Either he was responsible himself, or he knew who was. He was too quick on the uptake, his denials too studied, his evasions too self-effacing. Nothing short of a murder investigation could have kept an egotist like Masseter from forcing himself into the spotlight. But was he just lying, or had his personality actually changed? Volyova had said that the recording of Tan’s mind could be implanted somewhere else. But if Masseter had been the target, what new motivations might be controlling him now?

There had been something else, too. Something about— had it been Sylveste’s biography? She had been tolerably familiar with the man’s past at one point, of course, but that had been years ago. Something about his relationship with Calvin. About the neural scanner. Perhaps—

No, Masseter had slipped up, she realised. Nearly as badly as she had, in fact. He’d been taunting her about her source, smirking at her with that arrogant look of his. A flash of the old, familiar Masseter who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. And he’d asked about the murder weapon. _One of Calvin Sylveste’s little toys._ She’d never told him the cause of death. The bastard had a copy of the medical report.

It would be very interesting to find out where he had gotten it. And what he would do next.

**“Volyova: Criminal beginnings”: Novgorod: 2348**

* * *

She had improvised a sledge after all. There was no hope of reviving Beridze, but Volyova hadn’t wanted to abandon the woman’s body. She’d cut a hatch cover from the platform and buoyed up the edges with chunks of sealant foam so the thing would float. It was faster on water than on mud. Volyova had slipped and sworn and gotten up again a dozen times, watching the Ultras’ artificial sun dim slowly toward shipboard night. The platforms had become great shadowy hulks, looming over her like crumbling temples. Fallen spars had become harder and harder to see despite her newly augmented senses, reaching up to snag the sledge as if animated by personal malice. It had been fully dark by the time she’d reached the edge of the scrap and trudged up the path to the ragpickers’ dormitory.

“Anything saleable?” asked the servitor at the entranceway. It was a gamma-level expert system, just bright enough to count up the day’s takings and cache them for transfer into one of the smaller holds.

“We’ve had a casualty. Salma Beridze.”

“I don’t recognize that from the catalog. What kind of device?”

“Someone dead,” said Volyova. “A dead body.”

“I don’t understand,” said the servitor.

“Never mind. Nothing saleable.”

Volyova dropped the towline. Someone— some human Ultra— would find it soon enough. She stepped through the door into the decontamination shower.

She scrubbed, changed, and picked up a quick fabricator dinner to take back to her room. She had expected to be ravenous after her tiring day, but found that she wasn’t. Nonetheless she ate and drank with deliberate attention. She was going to need the energy. She considered a nap, but decided she was too anxious to sleep. Instead, she ordered a cup of strong tea, waiting impatiently for it to cool before gulping it down. She felt the caffeine put the edge back on her senses and wondered if the implants might be able to do the same thing, given the right commands. But there would be time to learn how to do that later.

She stepped into the common room. Lazarev was sitting with his usual circle, playing some kind of gambling game. The other ragpickers were sitting in small groups, chatting or finishing dinner. A few raised their heads briefly as she walked in, but none of them seemed particularly interested to see her.

“Lazarev,” she said, pitching her voice loud enough to carry across the room. He looked over his shoulder, not bothering to turn all the way around.

“Take a walk with me.”

“What? Are you mad?” He sounded annoyed more than anything else.

“Hardly. Are you going to fight me or not?”

“What for?”

“Beridze is dead.”

By now the rest of the room was paying attention. Volyova could hear a few people draw breath at the announcement. Even Lazarev’s friends sat up a bit straighter, waiting to see how the challenge would play out. He laid down his cards neatly, face-down on the table edge, before turning to face her.

“I’m sorry she’s dead. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Liar. _Svinya_.”

“My friends can vouch for me. I was with them all day.”

His tone was indulgent, slickly insincere.

“And the prospector you stole from us?”

“We found it first,” he said.

“And programmed it to kill her?”

“I’m done with this,” said Lazarev. “Go ahead and spew your rumors all you like. I don’t have to listen to insults from a paranoid little idiot who thinks a week’s experience makes her an Ultra-in-waiting.”

Volyova had been worried about the challenge, about what tricks Lazarev might planned for out in the scrap. It hadn’t crossed her mind that he wouldn’t fight her at all. She felt, for a long empty instant, like crying. But that wouldn’t get her anywhere, she thought. If he didn’t want to fight her, so be it: she’d fight him anyway. She picked up a heavy bolt driver someone had laid carelessly on one of the dining tables, advancing towards him.

Lazarev turned again, and she saw anger in his face for the first time.

“You want to know why you’re not worth fighting?”

He made a gesture. The pain was instant, the sudden spasm of a cramp in her left thigh. She staggered, struggling to keep her feet, before the other thigh seized as well and she found herself on the ground. Her ears rung; strange ghostly images flashed before her eyes, dark and bright flickering like moire patterns. She tried desperately to get up, but by now all her limbs were beyond her control. The room swayed vertiginously as she struggled to focus. She threw up, emptying her stomach in one gasping retch, then lay helpless on the floor, spitting up bitter mouthfuls of acid.

Above the ringing in her ears, she heard Lazarev’s voice.

“A _brezgatnik_ with implants is still a _brezgatnik_. Especially if she can’t secure them properly. You can stop staring now, the show is over. I believe it was four twos to you, Yelena?”

* * *

“All of them?” asked the doctor. “I don’t reinstall, you know.”

“All of them.”

There was still no expression in that birdlike, warbling voice, but Volyova thought the blue ring patterns on the doctor’s skin were moving faster, expressing surprise perhaps, or contempt.

“I’ll have to go in through the skull, this time. They’re harder to extract than to implant.”

“Fine with me.”

The doctor took down a tray of equipment and set it in front of her, stepping over to a sink to scrub up. Volyova studied it for a second: bright, chromed implements tipped with hooks and blades, wire-thin pincers and tiny articulated forceps, the dull compact casing of a high-powered pneumatic drill.

“You don’t scare me anymore,” she said. “Just fucking cut.”

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

Khouri stood at her office window, watching the trucks roll out. Three— no, four of them, bulky military four-by-fours packed with men and equipment, the last of them towing a heavy weapon under a tarp. A short-range rocket launcher, from the shape. She’d expected a reaction from Propaganda after her meeting with Masseter— planned on it, even. She wasn’t sure she’d expected this.

The trucks rattled down the street, headlights sweeping out through the dusty air as they turned onto the main road out of Cuvier. She allowed herself a brief moment of nostalgia. She remembered riding to the front in trucks like these, lulled by the heat and the engine’s gentle hum. Just a weapon, for someone else to aim and fire. Those had been simpler times, she thought. Easier times.

She drew the curtains and walked from the office.

* * *

“Marceau?”

“Boss? Wait, you didn’t make your flight?”

He pulled a form from one of the untidy piles on his desk.

“I had you booked for the outbound to Lyell this morning. You were going to meet Agent Four?”

“Something else came up. Come with me; we’re headed downstairs.”

Marceau shrugged.

“Whatever you say, boss.”

* * *

Khouri always wondered who had designed the interrogation level: whether they had smug office parties where they congratulated themselves over how miserable they had made it. Whether some of them still saw it in their dreams. She hoped so, that the architects sometimes woke from nightmare visions of that long walk down the unpainted corridor with its flickering lights and carefully calibrated drafts. She certainly had.

“Who’s the subject?” asked Marceau. “Source on the Triumvir?”

“Nah.” She sniffed disdainfully. “This guy’s strictly small-time. Has an angle on our murder case.”

“Gotcha. You going to be the sympathetic one this time?”

“We’ll play it by ear.”

She stopped at a room midway down the corridor.

“After you.”

Marceau stepped through the door, ducking as he entered the dark little room. Her kick caught him in the small of the back, sending him sprawling onto the stained resin of the floor. She stepped the rest of the way through the door, drawing her truncheon. He tried to rise, and the second blow caught him in the shoulder, knocking him back to hands and knees. After that, it was just a matter of making sure she didn’t kill him.

“Why— why me?”

Marceau didn’t meet her eyes. He was cradling his right hand in his left, looking down as if he could fit all the broken bones back together if he could only manage to concentrate.

“You leaked the medical report. Then the rendezvous with Four.”

“Could have been—”

“Don’t bother. I know exactly who saw those travel plans. All I need to know now is who you told.”

This was the moment, she knew, when he’d give up, or steel himself to keep going. There were machines in these cellars that could break him, of course. There was even a semi-functional trawl down here, although its subjects rarely survived long enough to give up much useful intelligence. But that would take time she didn’t have.

“It was someone in Propaganda,” she said gently. “Masseter, or one of his staff? That’s all I need to know.”

“Masseter,” said Marceau. “It was Masseter.”

He bent his head again, as if the confession had exhausted him.

“What’s going to happen to me now?”

“The regular investigators will be along soon,” she said. “They think you’ve been conspiring with terrorists. They’ll feed you the rest of the details. Cooperate and you should get hard labor.”

He slumped against the wall of the dingy little cell, utterly defeated.

“Nothing personal,” she said, and slipped back through the door, leaving him lying in the dark.

**“Volyova: Criminal beginnings”: Novgorod: 2348**

* * *

“No more tricks. No more games.”

Volyova looked up at Lazarev coldly. He wasn’t sitting down now. It was evening again, the dinner hour; she had caught him in front of an audience. She’d brought a better prop than the bolt driver, this time: a welder’s plasma torch. She touched the trigger, and it spat a brief, searing line of magenta, leaving a glowing afterimage across her field of vision. The implants would have compensated for that, she thought. Too bad. It made for good theater anyway.

“Walk with me, Lazarev, or I’ll slice you up right here and now.”

“For the last time, I didn’t kill her.”

She waved the torch. “Who do you think you’re fooling?”

“The torch won’t do you much good, out in the scrap.” It was a weak comeback.

“I won’t need the torch out there, _svinya._ Come and see.”

“Fine. Have it your way.”

“I expect I will.”

* * *

They walked down the hill in the dark, a few dozen meters apart. Above them, twinkling lights slid along the spine, a cargo container headed aft. For a moment, the shadows of the platforms reached out for her like giant hands. As they reached the water’s edge, they turned away from one another. Both of them, it appeared, knew exactly where they were going.

Lazarev was headed for the prospector; Volyova felt sure of it. It was his greatest advantage: robust, maneuverable and very quick. It must be hidden somewhere in the scrap. He wouldn’t have turned in something so useful to the Ultras before the ragpickers’ contract was up.

Volyova had her own plans, plans she’d spent the afternoon working out on her bracelet. She no longer had the implants. But that might be to her advantage in the end. She understood the bracelet at a much deeper level. The tools she’d installed on it were her own work, deadly efficient routines for infiltration and takeover. She’d meant them as salvage tools when she wrote them. But they had been easy to customize.

She headed for one of the larger platforms, one whose pattern reminded her of the place Beridze had died. It would have all the same equipment, everything she was looking for. Now, all she needed was time.

As it turned out, Lazarev gave her nearly forty minutes. She was sitting on the bridge when her bracelet signaled his arrival, leaning back in the chair she guessed had been the captain’s. The time for physical effort had long since passed; by now, her troops were doing all the work.

It had not taken her long to reprogram the manufactory. She had spent the first few minutes desperately stripping the platform of carbon fiberboard and metal fittings to feed into the machine, but then the first wave of bots had finished, and then the second, spreading out further and further into the empty rooms, bringing back whatever they could find to turn into more of themselves.

They were almost cute, she thought. Like squirrels, or marmosets. Except for the claws, of course.

Lazarev passed four of her pickets before he noticed one. The fifth sent a brief contact report, then dropped off the network. He had some kind of gun, then, something he’d rigged up to supplement the prospector. It wouldn’t be enough. She pulled back her front line as he clambered up onto the edge of the platform, then closed them in behind him, swarming over the prospector as it spidered up the side. Rising from her chair, she walked to the bridge window in time to see Lazarev frown down at his bracelet. He was wondering what had happened to his secret weapon; he’d have been better off worrying about himself.

But it was too late for him now. The bots rushed out from behind hatch covers and stanchions, and she saw his crude grenade launcher flash once, twice, the deck echoing dully with the detonations, before they brought him down. She kicked the weapon from his hand, waved for the little bots to pause in their attack.

“It’s not going to be fast,” said Volyova. “Not nearly as fast as Beridze. I’m paying back with interest.”

“I really didn’t kill her.” Lazarev looked up from the deck, blood trickling down his face. “Let me go— you can have the prospector, the rest of the salvage, whatever you want.”

“I’m getting what I want,” said Volyova. “I want to be an Ultra.”

“And you think torturing me to death will impress them?”

“That’s exactly what I think. Maybe I’ll even recover your neural lace, let them read the fine details out of your lifelogger.”

“Damn you, then.” Lazarev slumped back down, his lips moving in what looked like a prayer. She waved her hand again. The bots resumed their work, more slowly this time. Volyova lit up a cigarette. It was burned down to the filter by the time they finished.

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

Volyova had expected some warning before the knock at the door, an interval in which to prepare herself. But the weather had picked up, and she had discovered something she hadn’t known about the little surveyor’s shack: one of the skylight windows had blown out, and with the wind in the right direction, the whole place resonated with a soft, mournful whine. It gave her a bad feeling; she thought about sitting outside, where she’d be able to hear the trucks drive up, but if she did that, it would be too obvious that she was waiting for them. She sat in the cheap little folding chair she’d bought in Lyell Junction, and waited.

It was almost a relief when the door swung open, cutting off that eerie whistling sound. She had become very good at waiting, over the years. But she had never learned to like it. She held up her hands as they came inside.

“Not who you were expecting?”

The man sounded very pleased with himself, Volyova thought. He was forty or so, she guessed, with a toothy smile and broad shoulders, waving the heavy maser pistol in his hand as if it were weightless. The Proctor’s uniform flattered him, enough so that she suspected he’d had it tailored. She picked up a fresh pack of cigarettes.

“Hard to say,” she said, ripping at the cardboard. “I think I’m expecting a dead man.”

“I quite liked the biography,” she went on, appreciating the sudden silence. “Very exciting. Surprisingly accurate, as well. Excellent job— Proctor Lazarev.”

“I go by Masseter, these days.”

“Of course you do. Lazarev was only a beta-level simulation, after all; a cheap lifelogger can only do so much.”

She’d hoped to shock the man, keep him off balance. But it wasn’t working. He’d recovered quickly after that initial silence, gesturing one of his guards to take up a position by the door while the other swept her with some kind of portable scanner. The rest of the squad would be setting up a cordon around the site, she guessed, blocking the outlying roads in case she’d arranged for reinforcements. He didn’t see her as the main threat; without her devices, she was only an old woman in a shabby overcoat.

“She’s clean, Proctor.” The guard sweeping her moved back a few paces. She bobbed her head sardonically at him as he withdrew, then reached for her lighter again. She cupped her hand around a fresh cigarette to keep it out of the draft from the open door.

“How did you get your hands on the imprinting device in the first place? That is what it was, right? A neural scanner coupled to a write head: a copier, as it were.”

“It belonged to the Sylveste institute,” said Masseter. “Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t remember very much. Eidetic imprinting works best when the host’s neural pathways are similar to the donor’s. In my case, only the strongest drives and memories usually make the transition.”

“I’m flattered that you remember me so well, then.”

“Are you? You’ll live to regret it— briefly. How did you know about the imprint, anyway?”

“The same way you did,” she lied. “I paid for a copy of Coordinator Tan’s autopsy file. Or did you think you owned the only crooked agent in Inquisition House? The signs of a destructive neural scan are fairly obvious, although I suspect Vuilleumier’s team thought they were investigating a murder, not a suicide.”

She smiled slightly, exhaling smoke.

“I’m not even sure it counts as suicide, really. What do you think? If a man slices his own brain into sausage meat with an experimental neural recorder, and at the same time writes part of his consciousness into someone else’s head, who ends up getting prosecuted?”

Masseter grinned smugly.

“This is Resurgam, remember? I’m a Proctor. I can prosecute anyone I like. It’s why I switched from Tan to Masseter in the first place.”

“That’s the one thing I don’t understand. Why are you here in the first place? This world—” she waved a hand. “It’s awful. You must have come here long before I did. What were you looking for?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Masseter. “It’s who I am, at this point. But the question isn’t _who_ I am, it’s _what_ I am. Out here, I’m limited; Sylveste’s devices are stateless: read once and write once. But the beta-level in the Glitter Band was software, and trust me, it made plenty of copies.”

“How many of you are there?” Volyova stared at him. A whole race of them, spreading through the galaxy like vampires: one or two per colony, copying themselves from host to host. Levering themselves into positions of power and waiting, just for her.

“Hundreds, probably. I don’t even know anymore. But I found you first, didn’t I?”

“You’re the lucky winner.”

“Indeed. Cuff her to the chair, Tessier, and I’ll get started.”

The guard stepped forward again. Volyova blew smoke in his face, but she held her hands obediently behind her as he fumbled with the cuffs. He was having trouble getting them angled correctly, she noticed. He coughed sharply, and she felt the pressure of his hands ease. A second later, he thudded to the floor. She’d fabricated the cigarettes herself, from part of her left-over arsenal aboard _Nostalgia for Infinity_. The tricky part had been making the antidote. The poison had been easy.

“Get back!”

Masseter sounded genuinely fearful. She’d managed to get to him after all, she thought. Just not in the way she’d wanted to. She’d have been helpless in cuffs, but wasting her main surprise on a guard made her very vulnerable. If Khouri was late, or Masseter felt too scared to drag things out— she’d been assuming, after the horrors she’d seen in orbit around Hades, that she was going to die in some epic catastrophe, lit up in clouds of plasma, the lighthugger burning beneath her like a Viking funeral pyre. But in the final analysis, a scared conscript with a gun would do just as well.

From the safety of the doorframe, the guard leveled his weapon. She looked past him, at Masseter.

“Did you ever wonder how you actually died?” she asked. “You backed up every morning, didn’t you? The beta-level had no record of what actually went wrong.”

And almost sighed with relief as he took the bait.

“Hold fire.”

“Yes, Proctor.”

“Go ahead, then. I’ll admit I’m curious. And you’ll have another minute to see it coming.”

He gestured with the pistol.

“Wish you were backed up, now? It’s a limited sort of afterlife. But much more desirable when it’s all you have left.”

“Well, it wasn’t that crap about the manufactory, anyway. A whole robot army, made of insulation and kitchenware? A full-scale fabricator from the Glitter Band might have managed it. The one from a Novgorod mining platform could have made five or six per hour, I imagine.”

“It wasn’t a duel, either. By then, I’d figured out you hadn’t killed Beridze, and, young and naive as I was, I thought that meant we could forget that I’d called you out. You apparently didn’t agree…”

**Novgorod, 2348**

* * *

The prospector had almost gotten her. It was low to the ground, capable of hiding in a few feet of water, and Lazarev had stalked her with deadly patience, moving closer and closer as she waded through the muck between platforms. She was headed back to the platform where Beridze had died. She’d spent the night analyzing the samples she’d found in the dead woman’s hand, and now she had a hypothesis she wanted very badly to test about what had killed her.

Kitezh wasn’t supposed to have multicellular life, or so Volyova had always been told. But the surveyors had been mining engineers, not biologists. They’d run a quick chemical assay of the water, looking for the tell-tale phospholipids of complex cells, and decided the planet was too metallic to support any. They hadn’t thought to look for anything else. Beyond superstitious miners’ stories of haunts and phantoms, there had never been any reason to. But Volyova had done some reading, after her analysis of Beridze’s samples. There were other possibilities for cell biology, at least in theory. The tungsten compounds she’d found could create a semi-permeable membrane that wouldn’t show up on the chemical scan. And she’d found other metal compounds as well, heteropoly acids with highly complex three-dimensional structures.

The surveyors had been wrong: Kitezh wasn’t a barren world. Like many in its galactic neighborhood— like Resurgam, in fact— it was a recovering one. Only a few tens of thousands of years had passed since an asteroid impact had wiped the biome nearly clean. Volyova suspected something had survived. She just wasn’t sure what.

Occupied with her biological speculation, she hadn’t been thinking about Lazarev, or about the previous night. But she did have the penguin bot scanning the area around her. The signal it sent gave her just enough warning to dodge left as the prospector surged up from under the surface. She flicked desperately at her bracelet as she ran, missing the speed and convenience of the implants, and finally activated a simple defense routine for the penguin. The little bot circled the big one, lunging and withdrawing, like a sparrow trying to drive off a hawk from its nest. It might buy her a minute or so, if she was lucky. She ran towards the platform, hoping she’d have time to lock herself into the bridge while she coded a countermeasure, and then saw that Lazarev was already there.

He was standing on the deck, just above the funnel, holding some kind of improvised harpoon gun. She tried to dodge and slipped in the muck, his shot passing just overhead as she tried frantically to push herself upright again. She’d taken a mouthful of the filthy water despite the skinsuit, and she spat, the acrid tang of the metals like blood in her mouth. She had one option left. Lazarev was shoving another barbed slug of scrap metal into his gun, and she sprinted, making it to the shelter of the funnel with seconds to spare.

He’d have to come down now; the angle was too steep for him to shoot down from the deck. As she heard the clatter of his feet on the ladder, she slipped her bracelet from her wrist and keyed in a command she’d never really thought she’d use. She’d programmed it out of paranoia; it was a crude self-destruct, a feedback loop in the power supply that would take about a minute to set the battery on fire. She balanced the bracelet on top of the strange, leathery colonies that Beridze had been investigating the morning before, then edged backwards, away from the funnel, and tried to stay very still.

Lazarev reached the bottom of the ladder and splashed into the water in front of her, his enhanced eyes scanning the shadows. Just in front of him, she saw a brief flash and heard the hiss of steam as the bracelet flared up. He wheeled, aiming his gun, then laughed.

“Did you think that would hit me? Not much of a bomb, Volyova.”

As Lazarev turned back towards her, Volyova saw a faint ripple in the mud. She held her breath, hoping, and then something just barely broke the surface, a cluster of translucent hemispheres like peeled, quivering grapes. So she’d been right…

The creature under the funnel was a filter-feeder, one of the largest surviving species on Kitezh. It was slow-moving, nearly sessile; left to its own devices, it would have done nothing more than cling to something warm and wet, pumping algae through its outspread gills. Even before the extinction, it had possessed few natural predators. But Volyova had guessed that it had one defensive instinct, the one that had driven it to kill Beridze: protectiveness of its eggs.

She’d expected an attack, but its sheer speed took Volyova by surprise. For a moment she saw only blurred motion, heard only a splash and the rush of air. Lazarev buckled, dropping the gun, clutching at his suddenly broken arm. Only after it stopped moving did she get a good look at the creature’s claw, quivering slightly at the end of a purplish, many-jointed limb. It had the dull sheen of old wrought iron. Lazarev stared at it, face pale with shock, and then a second claw whipped out of the muck and slashed him across the middle. Volyova watched the claws begin to withdraw, much slower moving backwards than forwards. They made a clicking sound as they moved, as if the creature was winding back some kind of internal mainspring, powering up for another strike.

It wasn’t going to need one. Lazarev fell slowly to his knees, then to all fours, flailing for balance. Then his injured arm collapsed and he toppled, face-first, beneath the surface. She could smell something, drowning out the stinking mud and the algae, and after a moment she realized that it was blood.

**Resurgam, 2620**

* * *

“That was it?” Masseter shook his head. “All this time, I thought you’d come up with some brilliant new weapons system.”

“Tactics isn’t about having the best weapons. It’s about having the right ones.”

“Well, I think I’m ahead on that score.” Masseter hefted the maser pistol, testing its balance. “So, unless you have any other cheap tricks you’d like to attempt—”

And Volyova smiled with relief as she finally heard what she’d been listening for all this time: the faint mosquito whine of Khouri’s suit diving out of the cloud deck. It wasn’t a noisy engine at all. The quiet didn’t last, though. Not once the shooting started.

* * *

“Came as fast as I could,” said Khouri. Volyova thought her face flushed a bit as she spoke; beneath her dark skin it was difficult to tell.

“I had to be sure it was Masseter himself and not one of his staff. If we’d just shot down a figurehead, we’d have had to do this all over again in a month or two.”

“True enough. Of course, if you’d gotten me killed—”

“But I didn’t.”

“You never quite do.” Volyova made the odd clucking sound that was her version of a chuckle, and after a minute Khouri burst into laughter as well.

“So,” Khouri finally asked. “Which parts of that biography turned out to be true in the end?”

“Does it really matter to you?” Volyova crumpled the poisoned cigarettes into one of her coat pockets, withdrew a fresh pack, and started noisily in on the cardboard. “We’ve both done worse things.”

“I’m mostly just curious how you got to be the way you are.”

“Be patient,” said Volyova. “I’m sure you’ll find out in a few hundred years.”

“I’ve missed you,” Khouri said. “It’ll be a real disappointment when you finally give up putting our lives in danger.”

“ If you’re longing for excitement, there are still a couple of Masseter’s patrols you haven’t blown up. And then...”

Volyova looked skyward. There was nothing visible at this time of day, but Khouri knew they were both thinking the same thing. Somewhere out there was the Hades device Sylveste had awoken. The Inhibitors were stirring. She gazed up at the clouds, wondering how long they had left.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear recipient, I tried my best to satisfy your desire for mystery and teamwork. I had never quite realized how hard it was to write a science fiction mystery that made sense, so I hope I wasn't overambitious. I owe my anonymous beta a thousand thanks for pointing out all the plot details that didn't make sense. For the ones that still don't, I apologize.
> 
> I discovered a few interesting pieces of trivia while writing this that I will share with you.
> 
> There's an official RS timeline here: [http://www.alastairreynolds.com/rs-universe/revelation-space-universe-timeline](http://www.alastairreynolds.com/rs-universe/revelation-space-universe-timeline/)
> 
>  _brezgatnik_ means an Ultra with no implants, but I wasn't sure why. According to Wiktionary, _brezgat_ means "to be squeamish" or "to disdain".
> 
> Wikipedia has an article on [hypothetical inorganic biology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry), which linked me to this [New Scientist article](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-life-like-cells-are-made-of-metal/) on a synthetic biology project at the University of Glasgow. Because Wikipedia is awesome, that's why.


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